


run up to the rainbow girl.

by Misprinting (misprinting)



Series: check the headlines. [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bisexual Character, Christmas, Explicit Language, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Holidays, Manipulation, Mildly Dubious Consent, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Slash, Sexuality Crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-10
Updated: 2014-10-10
Packaged: 2018-02-20 13:11:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2430074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misprinting/pseuds/Misprinting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been a long road, chasing after their ghost. Sam drags Steve home for the holidays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	run up to the rainbow girl.

**Author's Note:**

> sequel to _boy draws wings on everything._ chronologically this fic should actually come third in the series, but for reasons even i don't know this ended up being done first. it's not something that matters for reading order as this fic and the fic i haven't written yet (to save confusion later, i'll tell you now that it'll be called _my swan will never sing._ ) are basically companion fics to each other. now that i've written this one first, i do think it works better for this to be the second fic in the series reading order, so that's why i'm posting now and not waiting. for info on the series chronology and which fics can be read as stand alone fics, see [the series notes](http://archiveofourown.org/series/158831). (why did i write a christmas fic in october? no one knows.)
> 
> this fic is set after (and during, briefly) cap 2 (many spoilers) as well as the end of AoS season one (no spoilers), and the title is from the national's 29 years.
> 
> there're a couple of fleshed out warnings in the end notes; i'd especially advise checking it out if the dubcon in the first fic was an issue for you, as it is discussed in-fic.

“Your idea of a Christmas present is really kind of fucked up, man.”

The folder in Sam’s hands is thick and full of information he’d never wanted to know and doesn’t want to be true, but it is, and they’re here — New York — to hand it off to its subject.

Steve, bundled up in a big coat and God only knows how many layers underneath, probably shrugs; he’s actually wearing so many layers that Sam can no longer tell. He’s also wearing a big knitted hat and a chunky, bright red scarf — gifts from Bruce last Christmas, Steve tells him, which doesn’t actually explain why he wears them. Sam gets the feeling that Steve and the cold do not play well together. He guesses it’s not so surprising, though it’d been a bit over the top of Steve to try to force Sam out to Melbourne over the winter, just because of some chatter they’d heard about there maybe being someone who might know someone who knows something about a secret Hydra base out there.

“I did get her a real present, too,” Steve protests. “It was you who insisted we come back here. You think she’d ever forgive either of us if we were in the same city as her and we failed to give her this file?”

“Don’t you pin this on me.” Sam shoves at Steve with his shoulder. “You carry on fearing Natasha all you want; there was no way I was staying out of the country for Christmas when I’d already skipped Thanksgiving. You haven’t met my mother, you don’t know what fresh hell I’d have been in if I hadn’t come home, but let me just say this: my mother makes Natasha look like a sweet and very well-adjusted young lady. She makes Natasha look like a sweet little kitten, okay. There’s no way I wasn’t coming home.”

Steve becomes Sam’s least favorite everything, a second later, when from behind him — the way Steve is looking, and with a smile, too — Natasha says, “No one makes me look like a well-adjusted or sweet anything, Wilson,” and Sam jumps maybe about three feet in the air.

Leaning in, she gives the both of them a kiss on each cheek, European style, before leading them down the street and into a crowded, Christmas-bedazzled coffee shop which Sam thinks is probably a Starbucks; he’s not sure, he’s too busy calming down from his heart attack and elbowing Steve for being such a little shit. 

(Look, it is not Sam’s fault that all superheroes have the mental age of ten year olds, or that in eight months with one of them it’s rubbed off on him.)

They find a booth at the back of the second floor and cup their hands around their hot drinks — Steve has to take his gloves off to do so and doesn’t look happy about it, which is so dumb, Sam’s about to tell him, because it’s not exactly freezing now they’re inside, but Natasha gets there first.

“What have you got for me?” she asks.

Suddenly Sam doesn’t care how dumb Steve is, or how he just burnt his tongue on his hot chocolate; all he’s focused on is how horrible it is to slide the folder over to Natasha knowing what she’s going to read inside it, just managing a “here” and avoiding her curious look as he does.

She flips it open with what must be feigned nonchalance, studying the first page for long moments while Sam and Steve sit awkwardly on the other side of the booth and, at least in Sam’s case, try not to move or even breathe too loudly.

Finally she looks up. Asks, “Where did you get this?” For a moment she looks absolutely devastated and Sam cannot move, cannot make his mouth work, can only think, _oh, God, we should never have shown her._

Steve reaches out with his palm up, offering support Sam doesn’t expect Natasha to take, doesn’t think any of them expect her to take, and which shocks all of them into absolute silence when she does take it, holding Steve’s hand in hers so tight Sam thinks her fingernails must be biting into Steve’s skin. If they are, Steve doesn’t seem to care.

“Hydra didn’t have Bucky in the fifties or sixties, the Soviets did, and we found some of their old… haunts. There were projects which came after Bucky was passed back to Zola’s control which used a lot of the same technology they’d developed to control him, and so his codename was all over them. That’s why we read them — though my Russian’s still not that great and I’m not sure —”

“And when you realized it was about me?” Her voice is level and cold, like polished ice, but the way she’s staring at Steve’s hand in hers is maybe a good thing. Sam hopes it’s a visual anchor. He hopes it’s enough to help. He hopes she doesn’t use her grip on Steve’s hand to twist it and break his wrist.

“Then we stopped reading,” Sam tells her. “We collected it all together and didn’t look at it again until we had the opportunity to bring it here, to you.”

And Steve adds, “We didn’t know if you’d want to read it or destroy it or lock it away somewhere. But whatever you want. We didn’t want to decide for you, or ask you over the phone.”

Sam can’t be sure with Natasha’s head ducked over their hands and the file the way it is, but he thinks she blinks furiously for a good few minutes while he and Steve just wait. Finally, though, she pulls her hand out of Steve’s and picks up the file. “You are both good men, “ she tells them. “And… I am going to go, now.”

“Natasha, I’m sorry,” Steve says, visibly stopping himself from reaching out to stop her. Natasha pauses in doing her coat up one handed, looking at Steve blankly for a moment before repeating, “You are good men,” and adding, “thank you.”

After a moment of silence where Sam and Steve don’t look at each other, Sam nudges Steve and tells him, “Your Christmas present better be fucking amazing.”

“You won’t think you’re so funny if I upend my coffee over your head,” Steve tells him, trying for a smile.

“Uh-huh, you’re going to waste a cup of coffee you just spent three dollars on.” Sam shakes his head at Steve. “First rule of business, Rogers: only make credible threats.”

“I’ll give you a credible threat.”

“Oh?” Sam laughs at him, but when Steve doesn’t join in he stops, takes hold of Steve’s shoulder and tells him, “hey, she’ll be okay. She just needs to deal with it in her own way, and we’ll be there for her when she needs it, okay?”

Steve is a man made of contradictions. So, when he smiles uncertainly and yet nods in determination, Sam’s not even surprised. And hey, knowing Steve, it’ll be that combination that wins the day.

**[ &]**

Back when Sam first meets Steve (and they flirt) (maybe) (a little) and Sam nearly dies from trying to outrun him (or impress him, whatever), Sam doesn’t think _holy sexuality crisis, Batman!_ or anything. He thinks _Wilson, get it together, he’s not a_ god, and puts the way he’s acting down to that. Steve being Captain America and being alive (which is still a surprise, honestly) and snarking (flirting?) back at Sam at whatever-the-hell-o’clock it is in the morning — that’s a big enough deal. Sam getting a little weak around the knees is just patriotism, or hero-worship. Something like that.

So when Steve gets picked up in a beautiful car by a beautiful redhead (who Sam definitely, one hundred percent flirts with, thanks) and speeds off out of Sam’s life, Sam vaguely wonders if he’ll see him again. Then he wonders if he just flirted with the Black Widow; subsequently tells himself to shut the hell up, that he’s imagining things, that meeting two of the Heroes of New York at the same time would be the stuff of dreams and fantasies only. He heads home, calling his sister on the way to tell her about meeting their childhood idol, getting a bit too into reminiscing with her over all the times they’d played Cap and the Commandos in their street with a bunch of other kids their age, and about the first time she made them all let her be Cap, only to fall from a tree and break her arm. After that she insisted on being Cap all the time, and she could guilt trip like no other. She tries to get him to promise to track Steve down and bring him home to meet the family; says, “Sammy, please God, latch onto him like a leech and don’t you dare let go,” and he laughs and tells her, “yeah, right, chance’d be a fine thing.”

So Steve turning up at the VA is a surprise. But Sam figures, hey, it makes sense, too; this guy was on the front lines of a World War not two years ago, so far as he’s concerned, and maybe he needs an ear to borrow and a shoulder to lean on. Sam’s too professional to call his sister right after this time. (And if there was some unprofessional flirting, maybe, in their conversation, Sam’s still professional enough to actually give him some good advice, too, and hope he’s said something that might help.)

The next time he sees Steve, it’s on the news. 

He’s in the staffroom at the VA the next day and they’re saying on the news that Captain America has gone rogue, that he blew up a government plane with his motorbike (“holy _shit,_ ” Sam tells the TV, with not a little admiration underneath all the shock and horror), and that anyone who sees him should keep a safe distance and call 911 immediately. Sam snorts and gets a look from one of the psychologists on file here, Melissa, as she comes in for a coffee. He gestures at the TV and asks, “can you believe this?” incredulous, completely, because no way does he believe in his government more than he believes in the Steve Rogers he’d met three days ago. But maybe there’s a part of him that’s worried about that, how quickly he’s started to trust in a guy he really barely knows from Adam, because when Melissa looks at the news and reads the scrolling tagline at the bottom (‘CAP TURNS AGAINST AMERICA’) and she says, “what the _fuck?_ No fucking way,” there’s a shift in Sam that he recognizes as relief.

But then there’s, fuck, there’s everything that happens after that; there’s Steve turning up at Sam’s house with the redhead — Sam never gets around to asking how they knew where Sam lives; really doesn’t feel like he needs to once he realizes that the redhead is called Natasha, and, more to the point, really is the Black Widow. They turn up, looking like they’ve come out of hell — just a missile strike, sure, whatever, okay, — apparently on the run from, fuck, everyone. 

Sam pulls them inside, gives them both clean towels and pushes them towards the bathroom. He methodically locks every door and window in the house and lowers every blind, then sticks a pot of coffee on and mixes up some bacon and some eggs. He’s got them cooking on the stove when he stops to boot up his laptop, searching ‘Captain America,’ coming up with an article on Steve’s fugitive status with a statement from the police saying that Captain America is traveling with a redheaded woman in her early thirties and that they are believed to have left DC, possibly traveling towards New Jersey. The reporter ends by saying, “reports of an explosion in New Jersey at an abandoned military base have yet to be substantiated,” which is something Sam figures he’ll have to ask Steve and Natasha about later.

Later comes with a pause in which Steve is wearing a white singlet and toweling off his hair, arm muscles impressively bulging and making Sam’s mouth dry right up for a moment. ( _Fucking…_ okay, Sam knows biceps, alright, but they’re fucking one hundred percent objectively the best arms Sam has ever seen.) He thinks he covers it up pretty well, even if he does sound like a fucking dork — “if you eat that kind of thing,” Jeez, — and honestly the momentary slip into is-that-an-appropriately-straight-reaction-to-a-man’s-biceps? gets drowned out almost immediately by things like the prospect of getting his wings back and then the hours of getting shot at that follow. 

Then Steve’s maybe dead, and then he isn’t but he’s not exactly healthy either — he’s looking distinctly stoppable, actually, lying pale in his almost too-small hospital bed — and Sam doesn’t have time to think anything along the lines of _holy sexuality crisis, Batman_ for a good long while. It simmers — the knowledge that, yeah, he probably is having a bit of a gay crisis for Captain America — underneath the surface of a lot of more important things, bubbling up occasionally. Like when Steve comes out the shower in just a towel, or when, on the rare occasions they have access to a kitchen on the road, Sam makes him pasta, only for Steve to just light up in a grateful smile as Sam sets it in front of him.

In the short run, Sam consoles himself, it’s not important.

**[ &]**

When Tony Stark offers to put you up for the holidays, you go live with freaking Tony Stark for the holidays. End of discussion. Sam’s eyes water imagining the luxury, the insane decorations, and, most importantly, the really fucking convenient location in the middle of the city for all the last minute shopping they both still have to do.

Steve puts up a good fight — not just against staying with Tony; he is super weirded out by everything Christmas chooses to be these days; has spent a lot of his time since early-October staring in store windows with horror and vague confusion on his face — but Sam eventually digs up his best puppy eyes and brings out the ‘I gave up my job and went chasing your best friend around the world for you’ card, and doesn’t feel a bit guilty for manipulating Steve. Mostly because he knows that if Steve really, truly, honestly doesn’t want to do anything he is fully capable of digging his heals in and being a stubborn little shit until the end of time.

Also, Tony has Netflix hooked up automatically to all his TVs (of course he does), and Steve is (not even that secretly) excited to catch up on House of Cards on a great big flatscreen. Compared to that, the floor Tony’s set aside and decorated for him doesn’t seem to even register — could be that’s Steve being oblivious, though; maybe he thinks Tony was being ironic when he ushered them in and said, “Rogers, mi casa es su casa, or, like, not really, but this floor? _Su casa_.” 

Second thought: maybe Steve just doesn’t speak any Spanish.

Sam brings it up over dinner, which is spaghetti in tomato sauce eaten on the couch in what is Steve’s new living room, even if he’s refusing to acknowledge it as such. They’re both in a good mood, Steve for having a good gym session and a reliable internet connection for the Netflix in his life, and Sam getting to cook for himself again — a simple luxury of its own after eight months of living off of diner food and granola bars.

“So, you know Tony was giving you this apartment, right?” Sam asks, once Steve comes back with his second plate of pasta. “Or, I guess I don’t know what you call an apartment that takes up a floor of a skyscraper but isn’t the penthouse. But: this. My point is, he’s giving you it.” 

Far from the shock he’d been expecting, Steve rolls his eyes.

“He’s been trying to give me this place since Christmas the year before last,” Steve tells him, exasperated the way he gets when a bus runs late — which actually can range from being a little annoyed to acting like the world has failed him and he fake-died for nothing, though in his defense that was one time and he had thought Sam was bleeding out. This time he’s a little annoyed. “And I keep telling him: not until he lets me pay appropriate rent. Also, two years ago his home had just blown up and his girlfriend was a paper-cut away from spontaneously combusting everywhere. I try to make it a point of not taking advantage of people when they’re down, so I turned him down. I bet he wishes he’d never tried to give it to me in the first place; it’s just pride talking when he keeps offering.”

There’s no arguing with Steve when his shoulders are set like that, but just then they’re interrupted anyway when Natasha emerges soundlessly from the kitchen with a plate of pasta in her hands and a mouth full of it already.

Around which she gracefully says, “Howdy, boys,” and sits in the space Steve leaves as he moves up on the couch for her. There are plenty other places to sit in the room — Sam has a love-seat to himself, and there’s an empty armchair by the window — but when Natasha puts her back to the corner of the couch, Sam realizes it’s also against the wall, and that now she’s both able to see anything that might come at her and is able to curl her legs against Steve’s side. Even if he were the jealous type, whether he were to be jealous of either or both of them, he’s not sure he could fault her for the enviable position she’s put herself in.

(He notes the way Steve had wordlessly given up the most easily defensible position in the room for her, as well as how comfortable they look sat so close together. One night in Oslo, sometime around the end of August, Steve had told Sam a bit of what had gone on between him and Natasha; the almost-friendship, the tests, the sex, and then finally the actual friendship. But since then, other than the day in the coffee shop, Sam’s not had much opportunity to observe them together like this. How… physical they are together shocks him, but in a good way. It’s soothing that these messed up idiots he likes so much can still be tender to each other.)

“This show is dumb,” Natasha tells them, gesturing to the paused TV screen.

“You’ve obviously never seen it, then. Though, to be fair, you’ll think so anyway. It doesn’t have any dancing,” Steve tells her. It dawns on Sam that Steve’s teasing her. Steve teases him about things all the damn time — the real Steve Rogers thinks he’s a real smart guy, Sam’s learnt — but it’s still damned weird to see him doing it to someone else. A woman, too. Normally, faced with a human being with breasts, Steve completely clams up, turning so shy he’s barely recognizable. He gets flustered and says something inexpressibly dumb, and it always makes Sam laugh until he can’t breathe. Now, Steve says: “But sometimes there’re sex scenes and I’m pretty sure I still blush like a stoplight.”

“Well,” Natasha concedes, taking the remote to un-pause the show. “I didn’t say it was without entertainment value, did I?”

**[ &]**

O ver the next few days they see Natasha several times, but she never once mentions the file they’d given her. The rest of the time they enjoy Tony’s hospitality, do not enjoy last-minute shopping for the holidays, and visit Sam’s relatives — his sister bursts into tears when she sees him, though it takes several days of conciliatory visits before his mom and dad forgive him for being out of the country again (as in, for the first time since he was in Afghanistan) at Thanksgiving. When they finally cave, Sam is in the garden with his nieces and nephews and he doesn’t hear what happens, but he knows Steve must have said something to them. His mom pulls him down to kiss him when he comes back inside and tells him he’d better be looking after himself out there, too, and so Sam’s pretty sure Steve had told her something about Steve needing someone to look out for him.

Natasha is also staying in the Tower, and it’s not just her; there’s also Bruce, who has taken up Tony’s offer of his own floor and been living there for over a year, now; Tony and Pepper, who live in the penthouse and are always busy, but who one night take Steve, Natasha and him out for dinner at the most expensive restaurant Sam’s ever breathed near, never mind eaten in; and Maria Hill, who both Steve and Tony avoid like she’s about to hand out missions but who practices yoga with Bruce and Natasha every morning. Thor, Pepper tells them while they’re at dinner, will be around between Christmas and New Year, taking a break from visiting his girlfriend’s relatives, and has also taken Tony up on living in the Tower whenever he’s on Earth and not shacked up with Jane.

“So that’s five Heroes of New York accounted for over the holidays, right? What —” 

Steve kicks him — it’s probably a harder kick than he’d meant because it makes Sam’s whole leg ache, but that just makes the kick itself more of a concern since it’s means Steve’s thrown off so much as to actually hurt Sam, so Sam bites down the end of his “what happened to Hawkeye?” question and lets Steve change the subject.

Natasha has other ideas. Though, from the shock everyone else at the table badly hides, it looks like she’s the one they were not bringing up the elephant in the room for.

“Clint didn’t let us know his plans,” she tells Sam simply, briefly touching a plain gold necklace in the shape of an arrow where it’s hanging around her neck. “None of us have seen him since before we took down S.H.I.E.L.D. He was on a deep cover mission when it all happened. I went after him, and he left me a message that he was leaving under his own power and that he didn’t want me following. So I… haven’t.”

“We got a message from a… mutual friend — you’ve met him, I’ve heard — saying Clint was okay,” Tony adds, and then, while Sam is still trying to figure out, a) who the mutual friend is, — Fury, maybe? — and, b) how the hell Steve hadn’t mentioned this all to him in the whole of the last eight months, Tony twists the conversation around to something Stark-centric in a move which is frankly elegant in its execution. And, even though it doesn’t fool anyone at the table, they go along with it all the same.

After dinner, Tony and Pepper convince Steve up to the penthouse for a drink and a conversation about that floor he keeps saying no to, and both Sam and Natasha beg off following them, knowing it’s probably going to dissolve from friendly drink into friendly argument, and no one has enough time in their lives to watch Stark and Rogers fight over who can be more of a stubborn idiot.

Sam heads up to Steve’s floor and is surprised when Natasha follows him; Tony goes to wolf-whistle as they step out of the elevator, but, thankfully, his good woman Pepper stops him. Sam wonders how many other times she’s saved his life.

Natasha heads straight for the lounge while Sam detours to the fridge, grabbing a couple of beers. Joining her again in the lounge, Natasha is already spread out across the couch and looks at him as he enters the room from upside down.

“I don’t want to fuck you,” she tells him.

“Wow.” Sam sits down in the armchair across from her. “That is the most unsolicited rejection I have ever experienced. Beer?” He opens one for her when she nods. Sam’s always thought the way a person drinks sets the tone for whatever sort of conversation they’re about to start, and, when Natasha swallows half her bear in one pull, he thinks they’re in for a heavy one.

“How much of the file did you read?” she asks.

Right. It’s that conversation. “Steve translated maybe… six pages for me, before we realized and stopped. I remember he was reading something like the fourth page when he started to frown and said something about how a bit of this here and there sounded familiar. As soon as we realized the project it kept coming back to was called Black Widow, we stopped.”

“You would just stop like that. Completely.” There’s a crease between her eyebrows, though Sam’s not sure he’d ever call Natasha confused. Absent of all the necessary information, maybe. “If there were a file like this on Steve or on you I wouldn’t have stopped reading for anything.”

“Well.” Sam doesn’t know what to say, exactly, to make it clear how completely different that is. How the things that made Steve Captain America and those that made Sam able to fly are so superficial compared to what was done to Natasha to make her the Black Widow; in Sam’s case, it’s not even permanent. All he can say is, “That’s… different.”

“Don’t think I’m not grateful,” Natasha tells him, her confused frown dissipating. “I just think the two of you are idiots. Just because I am your ally and your friend doesn’t mean I won’t always have the potential to threaten your safety. All you can do to defend against that is to know everything you can about me.”

“So that’s how you see us…” Sam takes a deep drink of his beer, contemplating how much more to take his life is now he’s friends with all these messed up superhuman people. “We’re on your side, but you have to know the damage we could do if that were ever not the case?”

“Of course.” The way she says it is half a joke, and she’s smiling, inviting him to not take it all so seriously. So why is it that Sam thinks this is the most open and honest he’s ever seen her? He wonders what Steve would say to all this if he were here, if he could tell Sam that this is how Natasha always is or if something about what was in that file changed her view of the world. He realizes that he really doesn’t know Natasha so well at all.

What Steve wouldn’t do, Sam’s pretty sure, is let Natasha talk him round in circles.

And, okay, maybe Steve couldn’t say: “So why is it you especially don’t want to fuck me?” But, well, Natasha came to talk to Sam, not Steve, for a reason.

There’s nothing Sam can pin down about Natasha’s body language that changes; he’s not even sure she moves. All the same, it’s like the atmosphere in the room shifts and like Natasha comes to full attention without moving a muscle, or even stilling one. She’s tapping her foot against the arm of the couch and that doesn’t stop or change tempo; equally, the way she’s watching Sam doesn’t change, she doesn’t clench her jaw, and her shoulders don’t stiffen.

And yet, somehow, it feels like all those things happen. Like the air even tastes different.

Natasha is still smiling.

She tells him: “When I got away from the people who made me… this,” she gestures at herself, as if to encompass everything she’s ever been or could be; the multitudes of Natasha Romanov. “And bear in mind that my memory was… That they had created me, from head to toe. I was aware of the existence of false memories in my head, but I… was unable to understand where they ended and the truth began. Manipulating other people — men, especially — was like a victory over the people who created me every time I did it. I was in control, and no one else was. It made me feel powerful.” Her mouth twists into something self-deprecating, and it looks wrong. It looks… Sam decides it’s the fact that she is powerful, more in command of every movement she makes than anyone he’s ever met, and it makes that smile look… not untrue, exactly. Wrong. 

“I thought I was using the skills they taught me and twisting them,” she continues. “Making them work for me. I don’t know when I forgot that it was their plan all along to make me that way. I don’t know when it became more important to me to be in control for the sake of not personally being vulnerable than for the sake of preventing them from gaining power over others, and myself. I never meant to take… joy out of manipulating people who never deserved to have their agency taken from them.” She pauses for a moment to finish her beer. Shrugs one shoulder and laughs once, bitterly. “I thought joining S.H.I.E.L.D meant using my skills _for_ people, finally, not against them, but you know what they say about good intentions.”

Natasha stops talking, stops tapping out a rhythm onto the couch arm, and tucks her legs up under her; for the first time, she avoids Sam’s eyes.

“Do you judge me, for what happened between me and Steve?”

It’s such a change of subject — at least, Sam _thinks_ it is, though his head spins a bit trying to come up with a connection good enough — that Sam doesn’t know what to say at first. He automatically wants to say, _of course not_ , but there are some people in this life who don’t deserve hastily spoken lies, and what Sam had read in that file of Natasha’s had told him she is one of them.

“I don’t know what happened between you and Steve,” he tells her, feeling as though the right words are slow to come to him. “I’ve only even heard half of his version.”

“What does _that_ sound like?” she asks, laughter almost bubbling up under the words. Sam isn’t sure if she’s mocking Steve or herself, though, and he must frown a little in wondering because she gives him a slightly apologetic look and says, “I didn’t want to hear it at the time, so I don’t exactly know.”

“You’re both idiots,” Sam tells her with feeling. She laughs, nodding in acknowledgement. “It was something like: he thinks you were testing his commitment to seeing you as an equal and to being your friend the whole time, and that when you slept together he broke a promise he’d never said out loud but you both knew was there. That even though he still thought of you as an equal and a friend, he acted like he didn’t. And that by breaking the promise he screwed up, somehow. Something like that. For one of the greatest strategical minds in the world, trying to follow Rogers’ logic sometimes is like being led through a maze by a blind man.”

Natasha takes all of it in without moving, even to smile or frown or give Sam anything else to go on but her blank face, defensive body language, and averted eyes, all of which he knows are probably so deliberate they’re not even a little admissible as evidence of anything. Until finally she sighs, shifts, and pulls her legs up so she can circle them with her arms and rest her chin on her knees. She watches Sam over the top of them.

“Would you judge me if I told you that that’s a little true, but that mostly what happened was I manipulated him into breaking a promise he’d made to himself? That I _liked_ him, and I manipulated him anyway.”

Sam frowns; he can’t stop himself, even though he sees Natasha’s grip on her own wrist tighten as she draws her legs in closer. It’s just, he’s Steve’s guy — it’s hard not to react at all to the idea of anyone hurting Steve willfully, and it’s made more complicated by all of Sam’s messy feelings of various degrees for both Steve and Natasha. It’s… a lot.

But Sam is a grown up, and he is fully capable of putting aside initial childish reactions when called for. And this calls for it. He takes a deep breath, lets go of his instinct to frown, and asks Natasha, “Well, why did you manipulate him? You said it’s all about power. What… power did he have over you?”

As though it’s getting harder and harder for her to find the answer, maybe to access the truth, Natasha takes a moment building up before she says anything else, looking anywhere but at Sam again.

When she does answer, she tells him, “At first it was just flirting, and it was just a game I play with everyone. I was testing him. How far could I push? Where was his line in the sand? What made it fun with Steve was that he knew that’s what I was doing the whole time.” She smiles; it flickers away quickly, but for the second it’s there it’s real. “It’s just a way of measuring the people around me; it’s how I make friends. I wasn’t ever going to push over the line and fuck him, that wasn’t the plan. I did it because by that point I’d have cared if things were flipped and it turned out he’d been manipulating me all along. I’d… care, if he decided he were done with me.” She stops, swallowing as if to shore up her voice. Says, “I am very good at playing games with people and not being played with. Steve is and was an easy mark, it’s just… he’s also an easy man to care about.” Her shrug is limp, there’s something so sad about it. “But I had to stay in control. Liking him… made me feel out of control.”

Sam has never seen her so affected — or, at least, genuinely. He spares another moment’s thought for the possibility that she’s playing him right now, and maybe he should be sparing more than a moment. But he’s read part of her file, and, the thing is, he doesn’t want to doubt her. So he chooses not to.

Her hands shake just the slightest amount before she tightens them, but when she looks at him it’s with the grit of determination and the stubborn jaw that reminds Sam a lot — a whole lot, actually; it makes him wonder where she pulls all these identities to inhabit if not from the people she gets to know along the way — of Steve. So, though a big part of him wants to, he doesn’t completely change the subject.

“Who do you trust?” he asks.

She blinks at him for a moment, maybe baffled by the question itself, or maybe by the assumption he’s making in asking it that she does trust someone. It doesn’t really matter which.

“Clint.” She says it with no more hesitation than that blink, no full second for thinking, so quick after all the pausing she’s had to do to tell Sam about herself that it’s a shock, almost. And Sam thinks it’s all the more likely to be true for how it’d almost been dredged up from her against her will.

“Hawkeye?” he clarifies, thinking ahead even as she nods. “So what’s different about Clint and Steve?”

They’re back to hesitation and carefully chosen words, but talking about Clint doesn’t seem to bother her as much. She tells Sam, “Clint is easy. I’ve known him since I was nineteen, and it’s not that I was any more trusting at that age — I was probably less — but, having known him that long…” Sam notices that every now and then she touches the necklace around her neck, as though she’s checking in with it. “I suppose we’re similar enough that I understand his motives, and he knows me well enough to understand mine. We don’t pretend we wouldn’t kill each other if we had to.” Something about that makes her smile, as if she’s remembering something pleasant. Sam reminds himself how lucky he is that he’s got real, normal friends to hang out with as well as this bag-of-cats crazy bunch of super-people. Natasha goes on. “But it took a long time to get there. Steve… Steve is a good man, and I don’t understand how the mind of a good man works.”

“Oh…” Sam smiles. “You do like him.” 

Natasha narrows her eyes at him. “I did say as much.”

Sam laughs, just for a moment, before remembering that’s not a great idea when the Black Widow is glaring at you. “You did, I just didn’t realize what kind you meant. Don’t worry, I get it.”

He immediately regrets putting it like that when she looks at him shrewdly and smirks, saying, “Yes, you do,” and making him flush like… well, like Steve would. She pushes her hair behind her ear as though it’s getting in her way and tells him, “You know, I taught him about sexuality, while we were being… friends.”

“They didn’t have that when he comes from?” Sam tries to think of a way to get this conversation back on the ‘why did you fuck Steve over’ track, rather than… whatever track this is, because Sam thinks it’s probably headed for embarrassment, and there’s no way Natasha intends on embarrassing herself. He can’t think of a damned thing.

“Not just sex,” she tells him frankly. “That came later. But the words, which have changed, and the ideas the words are supposed to describe.” Sam raises his eyebrows because, well, it’s not stuff he’d have expected Steve to be all caught up on. Especially since the mere mention of sex makes him blush like a tomato. Natasha touches her necklace again when she tells Sam, “I’ve always thought I was capable of — if not very interested in — loving people of any gender, but that I only found sex personally enjoyable with other women.”

To his credit, — though he’s not sure who is giving him this credit, he knows it is his due — Sam takes this revelation in stride.

“So, er, would you go with pan-, or bi-romantic homosexual, maybe?” he asks, trying to find the most polite way through this conversation. He’s pretty sure once he’s said it that that is not how it’s done, but he’s… still not sure what he wants to do about his own sexual identity crisis, okay, so… this whole thing leaves him feeling vulnerable in a way he really hadn’t expected when this conversation started.

He needs more beer, is what he’s saying.

Natasha shrugs, though; flutters a hand as if to encompass something ephemeral. “I tend to go with bi-demiromantic homosexual, but only if I haven’t had a drink, as otherwise I get very tongue-tied.” It’s just the look she gives him that shows she’s moderately impressed he’d known the words before having to be taught them. Silently, he thanks Melissa the psychologist at the VA and the presentation she’d given their whole team after she’d overheard one of Sam’s colleagues calling her a dyke — Sam’s still not sure if it was the glaring or the chocolate she’d given out for remembering things, but something had made it stick. And now he’s got maybe the most approval Natasha’s ever given anyone; he reminds himself to send Melissa something for Hanukkah this year.

“Something changed?” he asks. She nods, and for a moment it looks as though she won’t continue, that that’s it, end of weird-ass discussion.

“Fucking men was always mechanical, and I assumed… I mean, teaching someone to have sex, it’s bound to be mechanical, right? I knew I liked Steve, I knew he had power over me, but I thought we’d have some mechanical sex he thought was wonderful and I thought was bad and I’d be able to reset everything. Get the power back.”

Sam blinks at her while he tries to figure out what to do with the mess of what she’s telling him.

“You tried to fuck him out of your system?”

“Obviously.” 

Her smile tells him she’s laughing at herself, but Sam doesn’t want to laugh. He just thinks it’s sad, really fucking sad. He sighs. Suspends his knowledge of how people actually work for a moment and tries to go along with her.

“So why didn’t it work?” he asks, but the gleam in her eyes gives her away right before she tells him, and he gets there first. “Oh, hell,” he says. “No. Don’t tell me. Wonder boy is just. That. Good.”

Natasha smiles and shrugs, but there’s a disturbed look to her eyes that tells Sam there’s more to it still.

“No man’s ever made me come before.” The way she says it, it’s almost like it’s not about sex. For her sake, Sam tries to pretend it isn’t. “I never… expected it.” She pauses, shifting to curl her legs under her. “Have you ever faked?”

“No.” 

She nods. “Then you don’t know what it’s like to fuck someone expecting to not enjoy it. I’ve done that a lot.” She’s wearing this dress made of tight red lace, and she begins to pick at the hem of it. It makes Sam want to reach over and hold her hand. “And this time, I lost control somewhere along the way and it was… really good.” She laughs. “I told him we’d be really good together and I was more right than I knew. It was…” She searches for a word for minutes, whole ones, until finally she says, “It was excruciating.”

“And that’s why you ran?”

“I felt like my skin wanted to crawl off of my body,” she says, voice bleak and toneless. “So yes, that’s why. I still needed to get control back, so I made him think he’d fucked up when really I had.”

Sam wants so much to just put his head in his hands, because no, no, that’s not what happened either. Why get blame and guilt involved when there’re so many other emotions messing shit up already?

“And now you want me to judge you.”

Natasha shrugs, then nods, then spreads her hands as if to say either _go on then_ or _I don’t know_. Sam sort of wants to cry, or for her to; it’s just, there’s so much sadness about this whole thing, and he thinks that should make something happen, even if it’s just useless water spilled from tear ducts.

“Well I won’t do that,” Sam tells her. “That night was fucked up, on both sides. He was looking for someone to be his reason to hold on in this century, you were looking for someone to have power over, and neither one’s a healthy start to a relationship, or even a good reason to have a one night stand. But what matters is where you’ve got to now.”

She just watches him for a moment, face blank and mouth soft, free of tension. Then she nods.

“He’s my friend,” she says.

“Yeah,” Sam agrees. “And that’s not anything to sniff at.”

She takes a minute to think about that. Nods again. Then stands up and takes his empty beer bottle off him, taking it to the sink to be washed out. And when she’s done with that, she comes back to stand in front of him, touching his cheek with her knuckles.

“You’re a good friend to him,” she tells him. And then, “And to me, I think.”

Sam smiles, brushes her hand away and tells her, “Well, yeah, dumbass, of course to you as well.”

She flips him off for calling her a dumbass, but he’s never seen anyone but Steve look so happy to be called a name.

He can sigh and curse them all he wants, these idiot superheroes he keeps lumping himself with. He can want to strangle them all of the time. But he does like Steve and Natasha, he likes them a lot.

He thinks he’ll keep them.

**[ &]**

The other thing they do a lot of, while back in New York for the holidays, is look for signs of Bucky. When Sam had bullied Steve into coming back with him, spending some time with the people who know them, he hadn’t explicitly said “let’s take some time off from focusing all our energies on a ghost, take some us-time,” but he’d kind of hoped it was implied. He’d willfully ignored how bullheaded Steve is, and how chronically unable to look after himself first he consistently proves himself to be.

To be fair to Steve, — though Sam could equally say, like, ‘what makes it worse is that…’ — he doesn’t make a big deal of it. He very casually expresses an interest in checking out the part of town that used to be his, now he’s back in a New York that’s alien-less. He shows Sam where his old apartment used to be, where Bucky’s family used to live, and where he’d lived with his mom. It’s pretty cool to walk the streets Captain America grew up on with the man himself, so Sam isn’t exactly complaining, and after the fifth time Steve tells Sam, “I got beat up right here,” Sam just stops reacting, stops saying, “wait, you were how tall and there were _how many_ other guys?” and just goes with it, because Steve is Steve is Steve, and as if science could’ve ever changed him so fundamentally.

Sam only realizes what Steve’s doing when they’ve looped the building Bucky worked at for the second time, — realizes they’ve done the same to all the other buildings with significance to Steve and Bucky’s past, too — and realizes that Steve’s looking for signs of a visitor here, a POW come home. It’s only then that he puts together the lack of that evidence and the steadily-getting-worse slump to Steve’s shoulders, and, yeah, Sam doesn’t have the heart to tell Steve off for not knowing how to take a break properly.

“Hey, pretty sure I saw a burrito place around the corner; you up for one?” Sam asks instead. “They promised the best burritos in New York. C’mon, you love a burrito.”

Steve almost pulls together a smile, Sam does give him credit for that. 

In the line for burritos, Sam tries his best to sneakily send Natasha a text asking for exciting new ideas on how to turn slumped over, sad Steve into someone actually happy with their lot in life, if only for a few minutes. Sam has managed to do it a few times, and it’s been worth it — so worth it, indescribably worth it — every time, but after eight months he’s kind of run out of ideas. He’s maybe running out of energy a little, too, hence the forced march back to New York to recharge at the societally mandated time to do so. He’s pretty sure Steve catches sight of what Sam’s typing, but maybe Steve knows it’s time to ask for help, too, because he doesn’t say anything about it.

Instead of an inspiring text (Sam’s not sure where he got that fantasy from, but it’s dumb), the text Natasha sends back is simply a demand to know where they are. Sam sends her the rough address and name of the burrito place, and, forty minutes later, when they’re sat on a bench in a park opposite the burrito place, there’s a tap on Sam’s shoulder. Natasha says, “those guys lied, _these_ are the best burritos in New York,” and hands one to Steve and one to Sam, holding a half eaten one in her own hand.

Natasha waits until they’ve both got their mouths full — Sam imagines she’d say for shits and giggles, if asked, though he can’t pick holes in her strategy, either — to announce, “so, Sam’s going to go away now.”

Swallowing quickly, a recipe for indigestion, Sam asks, “I am?” and isn’t sure why Natasha’s smile — cat-like, and not exactly sweet — puts him at ease.

“Yes,” she tells him, gesturing with a hand to cut off both Sam’s and Steve’s questions. “Because me and Steve are going to go for a walk around a part of New York he has never been to before, and later we’re going to meet Pepper and Bruce at the Museum of Modern Art. You,” she points at Sam. “Are going to go do something for you; visit your family, go to the cinema, look up a friend from high school, go swimming, whatever.”

“Oh.”

It’s weird, how much Sam welcomes the rug-pulled-from-under-him feeling that happens right then. He glances at Steve and almost laughs, almost hugs him, because Steve’s expression is right in the morphing stage between confusion and guilt. And maybe Sam’s face doesn’t look so dissimilar, for all that it’d be morphing between confusion and relief, instead. Because yeah, it’s not a bad thing to take an afternoon to himself.

Something about the way Natasha looks at him then is soft, though, as she adds, “and at eight, if you head back to the Tower, you’ll find Maria and Colonel Rhodes corralling Stark into a car which will take the three of you to a restaurant, where we will meet you.”

And it happens just as she promises. Sam goes, — hearing Natasha tell Steve unequivocally that “this is not a date,” and Steve reply, “well, no, I got that from the general tone of babysitting,” and then, “is this what Tony’s life is like?”

Sam heads to his sister’s flat and crashes with her on her couch while she tells him all about the idiot she’s dating and all the reasons she loves them, huddled together under a blanket to share warmth and for easy reach when they need to pinch or tickle or otherwise harass each other. She gives him root beer and they eat ice cream together, watching cartoons, and she does ask, “are we mourning a break up you just didn’t tell me about?” but otherwise she doesn’t push to know why he needs her and a little TLC. 

On the way back to the Tower, Sam’s shoulders feel ten tons lighter. Turns out, though he wouldn’t and won’t give him up for the world, being the shoulder Captain America leans on is not light work.

He tells Steve as much at dinner, turning it into a joke. Steve, maybe a little because he’s not three glasses of some really special red wine down like Sam is, doesn’t laugh; instead considers Sam, making Sam feel like he himself is being weighed, and finally says, “You’re really the best friend I could ask for.” Then, after putting an arm around Sam’s shoulders and pulling him an inch closer, — an inch Sam is really aware of — he adds, “thanks for bringing me home for the holidays.”

There’s nothing guilty in him, nothing regretful; Sam had maybe assumed Steve would take issue with leaning on Sam so much now he’s been made aware of it, that it’d make him pull away or try to save Sam from what he’d assume was his own selfishness. But Steve does nothing if not surprise, and maybe Natasha had talked to him this afternoon; maybe she’d said, “he chose to go with you, he chose to help, and he’s not backing out. So don’t push him away.”

Or maybe Steve’s just better than anyone ever expects, every time, no prompting needed.

Sam smiles back at him, not even bothered when he has to push away the (dumb, really dumb) urge to kiss Steve right there where they are at a table in front of basically all of Steve’s friends. He asks, “even though Christmas has been ruined by Capitalism?”

Steve’s smile is something special. “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I hate that, don’t get me wrong, but there’s still a lot that’s the same, and I’d kind of forgotten what it does to people, how it can make them want to do better. Be better. It’s… nice.”

“And then in January everything’ll be crap again,” Sam tells him, and he cannot believe what a little shit Steve is when he grins and tells Sam, “that’s the spirit!” as though it’s Sam’s Christmas spirit that’s in question right now.

Thing is, Sam wouldn’t have him any other way.

**[ &]**

Things really hot up in the Wilson household on the eve of Christmas Eve. Sam makes a big deal telling Steve about his Great Aunt, who’s even older than Steve is, and about how Sam’s Grandpa will always let all his sons and grandsons — plus Sam’s sister, after an annual argument — have one of his prized cigars each. He just expects Steve to be up for it, so when Steve says, “you know, I think I’ll sit this one out. Let you have some family time,” it really feels like a sucker punch.

Sam, who had been making coffee, abruptly stops. He turns to watch Steve, looking for a clue, but Steve is just calm, smiling a little indulgently, fondly, maybe. So Sam asks, “this isn’t about me needing a break yesterday, is it?”

Steve immediately brings his hands up, palms flat and placating. “Sam, no,” he says.

“Good.” Sam points a finger at him. “Good. Because you don’t get to push me away with some dumb, self-sacrificing speech. Got that?”

Steve’s smile hasn’t lost any of the fondness or even an iota of the indulgence when it comes back. “Sam, that’s not what this is,” he says. “It’s just that Tony’s enlisted me to help pick out a gift for Pepper, and Rhodey warned me it’d take all day.” He’s a good enough man not to mention the relief that must be all over Sam’s face, even though Sam’s sure it’s completely disproportionate to the reality of Steve deciding himself to spend a day away from Sam. It’s not that Sam hadn’t realized they were becoming stupidly co-dependent, it’s just he hadn’t expected Steve to be the better one at pulling away.

“Hey, uh, you could ask Nat?” Steve suggests, in what is the last thing Sam expected to come from his mouth. 

“Ask Natasha?” Sam repeats. “To come hang out with my family? On Christmas Eve eve?”

Steve shrugs, which’d be more convincing if anything at all about his face said nonchalant. It doesn’t. “It’s just, I doubt she’s ever done a proper family Christmas,” he tells Sam. “Just think about it.”

He changes the subject, but Sam does think about it. And in the end he figures, _what the hell?_ So he asks her.

“I didn’t know we were there,” Natasha tells him, eyes glinting — maybe to hide the look of absolute astonishment he’d caught a bare second of. “You’ve not even asked me on a date yet.”

Sam shrugs, says, “Hey, take it up with Steve. He stood me up.”

She laughs, considering him even so. Says, “I do have a new cover I’m practicing. She’s sweet, an accountant; your mom’ll love her.”

“You can’t come as you?” Sam asks, and at the look she gives him — blank, dangerous — raises his hands and adds, “hey, look, it’s just they know what circles I’m running in right now, and you don’t have to use a cover around me. And I don’t lie to my family.” He doesn’t say _and also my family loves taking in lost ducklings_ because he’s very attached to all of his limbs and he’d like for it to stay that way.

He thinks she’s saying yes when she gets up and leads him into her bedroom, and then through another door into a walk-in closet the size of most of the motel rooms Sam and Steve had lived in since April. But then, with her back to him so he can’t see her face, she asks: “what if I don’t know how to be me?” She pulls out a pair of jeans and a Christmas sweater, shows Sam, and says, “see, this is what the accountant would wear to meet your family.” There’s something almost wistful about the way she touches the wool of the sweater. “I can even tell you what underwear she’d pick out.” She puts the sweater and jeans away, pulling out a blue dress with full sleeves and a high neck and tells him, “And this is what an old cover, Natalie, a lawyer, this is what she’d wear.” She shrugs, like, _hey, I’ve got nothing_. And that’s absolutely terrifying, underneath how sad it is.

“I am no good with clothes,” Sam tells her, hands up in surrender, but he takes the blue dress off of her, puts it back on the rail. “I know this is a lot for you and I’m not trying to rush you, but I promise you, my family are the most forgiving people in the world, and they won’t ask for more than that you’re fully clothed.” Sam watches as she scans the rails, touching fabrics occasionally, studiously not looking at him. “Do you need to suit up? Because my nieces and nephews are already in love with you, but they’d be so into it if you did.”

Natasha smiles, says, “No, I don’t need to suit up.” She pulls something off the rails and, absently, as if an afterthought, says, “You can go now, I’m done having a crisis. I’ll be out in five.”

She is, wearing a pair of jeans, — maybe the ones she’d first picked out, don’t ask Sam — boots, a leather jacket, and a Nirvana tshirt.

“Looking good, Natasha,” Sam tells her, letting her take his arm and walking with her to the elevator. 

She ducks her head, smiling, and says, “Nat.”

“Nat?”

She nods. “Steve started it, and I like it. So it’s what my friends call me.”

“Alright then,” Sam agrees, and feels happy enough to pop, a feeling which sticks around all day as Sam’s mom and dad love Nat — Sam has to admit, to someone who doesn’t know she’s doing it to consciously try to bring out the self that’s been systematically crushed for thirty years, her habit of stopping mid-sentence, apologizing, and rephrasing whatever she was saying; it must be pretty cute — and, even without the suit, Sam’s nieces and nephews adore her, too.

Steve takes one look at Sam when he gets back to Steve’s that night, grins, and says, “I told you.”

Sam shoves Steve away from the chili he’s mutilating, says, “you’re the worlds worst cook,” and “I hate you.”

He doesn’t, he totally doesn’t.

**[ &]**

The afternoon of the day after Christmas finds Sam and Steve laid up on Sam’s parents’ couch beside Sam’s brothers, his sister, and his dad.

“The thing where everyone eats more than they’ll eat in the whole rest of the year;” Steve tells them all. “That hasn’t changed.”

“I hate that you don’t have a hangover right now,” Sam’s sister tells Steve, and when Steve shrugs and flashes a shit eating grin at her she tells him, “If I could get up, I’d be giving you the worst noogie of your life.”

“That means you’re one of us,” Sam’s oldest brother stage-whispers to Steve, and the way it makes him smile — so small, but like it could light a universe — does two things. It makes Sam’s heart jump, and, more importantly, it makes him realize how right, how completely _right_ he was to bring Steve home.

**[ &]**

Later, back at the Tower, Sam says goodnight to Steve and is just about to head to bed when Steve calls him back, says, “uh, Sam, you know…” and trails off, words lost.

Sam comes back to stand in front of Steve where he’s leaning against the back of the armchair, arms crossed, only looking at Sam instead of his feet through sheer force of will, it looks like. “Yeah?” Sam asks.

Steve’s jaw goes all stubborn. “You and Nat,” he says. “It’s… I mean. I think it’s good.”

Sam makes sure to blink and to process with at least a few cogs of his brain. “Me and Nat?” he asks, wary.

“Yeah,” Steve says, gunning for a smile. “I think it’s a good thing, the hanging out you’re doing. I’d understand if you felt like you couldn’t tell me, too, but if it’s more like dating and less like hanging out, then, I think that’s good too.”

“Are you—“ There’re a bunch of things it crosses Sam’s mind to finish that aborted sentence with, starting with _out of your mind_ and ending with _really saying what I think you’re saying_. He settles for telling him, “what?” It sums a lot of them up, he feels.

Steve shrugs, and with his arms folded he ends up shrugging with his whole torso, all tensed apathy. “I want you both to be happy,” Steve says. “So I just wanted to let you know that I think it’s good, before you went assuming whatever else I might think of it.”

Sam wants to throw up his hands and walk away from this ridiculous conversation, but what he ends up doing is saying, “Rogers,” — through clenched teeth — “it was your idea to take her to meet my family.”

Steve blushes, the little shit. He blushes, and looks Sam right in the eye, and says, “you’re the one who asked her” like that absolves him of anything, ever, at all.

“Steve,” he says, trying to be reasonable. “I don’t—“

“Just…” Steve leans forward a little, looking so earnest and well-meaning it’s almost enough to make Sam forget how dumb he is. “Just please don’t pretend like you don’t like her if you do, at least not for me.”

“Steve…” This time Sam knows that every bit of how much he wants to hug Steve is in his voice, and in return Steve smiles at him, so rueful and so earnest.

“Also,” Steve says, drawing himself back up to his full height. “I care about her a lot, and about you, too, so just… She’s incredible, and she’s very… You know how…” He waves a hand, having trouble with the words he wants to use. “I don’t want anyone getting hurt,” he says finally.

“Wait,” Sam says. “Are you trying to give me the shovel talk right now? Or is this the reverse-shovel talk? I really can’t tell.”

Steve’s frown is worth a thousand words; really, it is. “I have no idea what that means,” he says.

“Oh, man, right.” They’ve had less of these situations recently, which is only a good thing; turns out, Sam is the worst at explaining pop culture. He tries, though, says, “Um. It’s like… the talk you give someone, the ‘I’ll kill you and they’ll never find the body’ talk you give whoever’s trying to date, like, your sister or something.”

The look Steve gives him would be more appropriate if Sam had declared himself a firm believer in Hydra. “Please never say anything that makes it sound like Natasha is my sister ever again,” he says. Sam stifles a laugh, says, “Oh God, man, I am so sorry,” — he isn’t sorry at all — and “you know what? That’s my bad. Sorry.”

“I hate you,” Steve tells him with feeling.

Steve’s not the only one with a shit-eating grin. Sam comes to lean against the back of the armchair next to Steve, nudges him with his shoulder, and asks, “Shovel or reverse-shovel?”

Steve ducks his head, blushing up the back of his neck. Plaintive as Sam’s ever heard him, he says, “I don’t know. Both?” He shrugs. “You’re… probably more put together, you know, issues-wise; could you just try to make sure you don’t hurt each other?” He looks at Sam from under his eyelashes, and that’s the thing about Steve: in some ways, he’s no less capable of manipulation than Natasha is. Also, that look should be illegal. “Because I care about both of you, and if I have to choose sides I won’t know what to do or who to be mad at.”

There’s nothing to say to that but clap Steve on the back with a sigh and to say, matching Steve point for point in terms of earnestness, “Cap, I promise.”

It’s not until after a manly hug and a second goodnight that Sam realizes he totally forgot to actually say: _hey, Steve, me and Nat are not actually dating_. 

Fuck. And he calls Steve dumb.

**[ &]**

The next day, Natasha ambushes Sam on the way back from getting lunch with a couple of friends from high school, finding him seconds after he enters the Tower and stopping in front of Sam, arms folded, her look all business-blank.

“Steve thinks we’re dating.”

“Fuck,” Sam tells her, and nearly laughs when she tilts her head. He has more sense than to actually laugh. “I meant to tell him we weren’t,” he promises. “I was just so busy dealing with how earnest and well meaning he was being that I forgot. I’m sorry.” She purses her lips. “I’ll go tell him.”

He’s almost past her to go do just that when she catches his arm. “No,” she says. Then she grins wickedly and explains, “This is more fun.”

She’s gone before he can say anything.

A couple of hours later he’s sat with Pepper, watching Steve and Tony fight over the apartment for what Pepper tells him is the seventh time this week, when Natasha finds him again. Pepper looks between them and discretely gets her phone out, half turning her back on them by way of giving them privacy.

“I’ve been thinking,” Natasha tells him, sitting down next to him. “He wasn’t upset about it, was he?”

Sam tells her the truth. Says, “No, he seemed… pretty happy for both of us, actually. Wary, and concerned. But happy.”

Natasha watches him carefully as he speaks, measuring him. He’s always suspected her of being a human lie detector. She says, “good,” nods sharply, and leaves again without anything more being said.

“All my friends are so weird,” Sam tells Pepper, who laughs and says, “yep!” in what is really too perky a way for someone who has known Tony Stark as long as.

_Note to self:_ he thinks. _Ask what her secret is._

**[ &]**

When the message comes through, on the first day of 2015, it comes, ironically, in the least high tech way possible.

Sam and Natasha are trying to persuade Steve to come ice skating with them that evening while they’re out on their morning run around Central Park, only Steve is very reluctant to go near the idea of ice skating and keeps zipping off ahead of them to run one of the shorter loops and catch up with them a few minutes later.

He’s just gone off to run a loop of JKO Reservoir when a kid on a skateboard comes up to coast alongside Sam and Natasha, on Sam’s side, and studies them both a little too closely. Nat and Sam exchange glances, Sam, at least, trying to decide if this is one of the rare times he and Nat are going to get recognized without Steve there, or if they’ve got a really unsubtle agent of Hydra on their hands.

The kid reaches out towards them and, before Sam can even blink twice, there’s a clattering crash as Nat pins the kid to the ground with both hands behind his back and tells him, “talk quickly.”

“Holy _fucking Christ_ ,” the kid says. “Jesus, get _off_ me, you crazy psycho bitch! I’ve got a fucking message for Captain America, okay, now let me the fuck up.”

Natasha doesn’t. “What message?”

“It’s in my jacket pocket,” the kid tells her, and on Nat’s nod Sam helps her lever him up so he can get at the pocket, pulling out an envelope addressed to Steve Rogers in tight, handwritten script. Pulling the kid up to his feet, Natasha checks him over and apologizes for taking him down. The kid looks all set to get in-her-face angry until she tells him she’d thought he might be Hydra, at which point he decides getting tackled to the ground by the Black Widow is the coolest thing that’s ever happened to him in his life.

He still gets the hell out of there as soon as Sam hands him back his skateboard, and for that Sam can’t blame him.

“What happened here?” Steve asks, jogging up to stop in front of them, looking back and forth between the both of them. “Did that kid really just react like that to being mistaken for a Hydra agent? Please tell me I misheard.”

Sam holds the letter out to Steve, saying, “message for you, apparently,” and watching closely as Steve sees the writing and stops breathing. His eyes widen, his mouth even gapes; it’s a textbook surprised face. Sam’d bet anything in that moment that Steve’s just recognized the handwriting of his best friend.

Steve rips open the envelope and his hands are actually shaking when he pulls out a newspaper clipping from yesterday, featuring a picture of Steve and Pepper at an art auction that’d been held the night before that. Someone has written six numbers along the vertical edge of the picture, and another six along the horizontal.

They all know what they are; no one needs to say “co-ordinates!” Steve’s face tells the story on its own.

**[ &]**

At some point between the Chitauri invasion and this holiday period, Tony either stole or built himself one of S.H.I.E.L.D’s quinjets — one of the ones that can turn basically invisible, too, just for extra awesome.

Steve’s look is so frantic that Tony doesn’t even bat an eye when Steve asks for the keys, just tosses them to him and reminds him to take someone who can actually fly the damn thing before asking if he wants back up. Steve waves him off, and Sam would stay a moment longer to explain why they’re borrowing Tony’s jet, but he’s pretty sure Steve will take off without him. Sam’s come too far on this journey to miss his ride now.

Natasha flies the thing, not even pausing for Steve to give her the co-ordinates before she gets her in the air.

“Further west and further north than we are right now is all I need to know to get her out of New York, Cap,” she tells him.

The co-ordinates lead them to unbroken forrest which stretches for around six square miles, and which from above looks to be dense and damned infuriating to cut a track through. The co-ordinates tell them to head for the middle.

None of them say anything about how weird, how unlikely this all is, though Natasha has JARVIS keep them on an open line with the Tower in case this is either a distraction from shit going down at home or a trap. They swoop low over the tree line, circling methodically closer to the centre of the forest rather than gunning straight for it, and, even though he’s fidgeting all through it, the caution is Steve’s idea.

One of the devices on the dashboard does something to make Natasha start, pause the jet where it is and hover for several moments while she inputs something into it and then says, “boys, I’m going to try something stupid and I want you to try not to freak out,” before sending the jet into a straight vertical descent.

There’s no time to freak out. One second Sam’s looking outside and his eyes are telling him they’re about to crash into the tops of some trees. The next, the trees around them for a hundred feet either side have disappeared, and right below them is a big fuck-off McMansion and a small figure standing in front of it dressed in a deep blue military coat. The sound Steve makes is pure broken happiness and hope.

On touch down, Steve is already at the door, is already outside, is feet away from his best friend before Sam’s even made it out of his seat. Only then he stops, frozen completely, his expression a mix of joy and shock that almost melts down to blankness.

Bucky takes one step towards them, offering up a smile and relaxed, empty hands. It’s only when Bucky nods to her that Sam realizes Nat is the only one among them with a survival instinct, that she has her gun trained to the spot between Bucky’s eyebrows. She nods back, but doesn’t put it away.

Bucky gestures to the house and gives them all a rueful sort of grin. Says, “It’s nice, right? This was Pierce’s, and now… now it’s a peace offering, if you’ll take it.”

Distantly, Sam is surprised at the off-handed way Bucky name-drops his former handler, is completely shocked that he’s acting so much like the Bucky Steve made come alive through all his stories. Steve, maybe because of all this, after Sam telling him over and over again “you can’t expect him to be the same,” looks like he literally cannot move, like the distance now is too big when he’s chased Bucky the entire way around the world already.

Shifting his feet, Bucky doesn’t look anything like the guy Sam first saw on a bridge in DC eight months ago; his hair’s been cut and he’s not visibly carrying any weapons, for a start. And he looks worried, he looks like an open book of hope and anxiety and trembling fear, barely held together as he shifts his weight to one foot and asks, “So, uh, should I start putting my hands on my head and getting down on my knees, or what?”

Steve still doesn’t move, but this is why Sam’s here. To help. So he steps forward. Holds out a hand for Bucky to stare at in shock for a moment before grabbing it, shaking it once, firmly. He stares as Sam smiles.

“Hey, man,” he says. “It’s good to meet you. I’m Sam Wilson.” Bucky continues to stare between him and Steve in shocked silence, so Sam gestures to Natasha over his shoulder and says, “the lady pointing the gun at you is Natasha, and I figure you maybe know Steve already, though you’ll have to bear with him a moment. He’s been busy trying to find you all this time, y’see, and now you’re really here I think he needs time to check the sky is still blue.”

But the time it takes Sam to say all that is enough for Steve to start moving again, to walk the five paces needed and to pull Bucky into a hug that might actually be bone breaking. They’re both shaking, and Steve hides his face in Bucky’s shoulder as though he’s ever going to hide those tears he’s choking his way through. Bucky’s handholds on the back of Steve’s shirt look set to break fabric.

They look like nothing could break them apart. Sam promises himself he’ll stand in the way of anything that dares to try, and, from the look in Natasha’s eyes as she watches them and stows away her gun, he won’t be doing it alone.

**[ &]**

That warm and fuzzy feeling of togetherness, the us-against-the-world stuff, lasts until Bucky extricates himself from the hug, wipes his eyes on the back of his hands, and tells Natasha, “Hey, uh, Clint told me to tell you he’d meet you back at the Tower.”

All Sam can say is, he’ll consider himself a lucky man if he never witnesses the results of that look of pure murder on Natasha’s face. Though what had been worse to watch was Natasha’s face falling, absolutely relieved and devastated in one moment, before she’d pulled herself back to murder and revenge.

No one protests when she takes the quinjet.

**[ &]**

Sam decides, without any input from the other two, — because Steve, at least, is not emotionally up to making rational decisions, and because Bucky, on the other hand, was an assassin for Hydra about five minutes ago, so far as they knew — that they’re staying at the McMansion for a few days.

“Let’s regroup,” he tells them, and for his sake doesn’t acknowledge Steve’s badly hidden gratitude for not mentioning why keeping Bucky away from highly populated areas before they’ve had time to do more than the hug test is a grand old plan. “Is there food in this place?” he asks Bucky, who nods.

“It’s stocked and fortified to act as a nuclear bunker,” he tells them. “We could hide out here for a couple of months if we wanted to.”

They stay for five days. Sam watches Steve more than Bucky, watching equally for signs that Bucky’s not acting like Steve could script for him or that Steve’s finally on his way to a stress-induced breakdown, but all he finds in Steve is happiness, joy like Sam’s only ever seen in him in bright bursts of moments. Bucky is quiet, twitchy, and slow to smile, but he also shit-talks with Steve the way only a best friend can, tells jokes which tend towards the self-deprecating side of things but which all the same show a solid sense of identity, and has a good grasp of current events. There are areas of the mansion he skirts around with both his body and his eyes, including the stove in the kitchen, and he sleeps on couch cushions underneath the window in the room Steve takes for himself, three knives lined up beside him. One morning he walks into the kitchen with a gait that says he’s still half-asleep and when he sees Steve he turns ghost-white, sits down on the floor just where he is, puts his head in his hands and holds that position for over ten minutes until Steve leaves the room and Bucky pulls himself out of wherever he’d gone. He tells Sam, “thought they had him,” and Sam assures him, “they don’t; I promise I will never let that happen.” The look Bucky gives him — cautious relief, like a kid used to broken promises who can’t help but hope that this time, this one will be kept — tells Sam all he needs to know. It’s a promise Sam doesn’t think Bucky will ever ask for on his own behalf. Sam silently makes it anyway.

After the five days, they load up into the car Bucky came in on and drive back to the city. It feels a slow drive once they’re going, Sam itching to get back for reasons he can’t quite pin to his family or his home town. He thinks maybe the holiday stay in New York had reminded him how much he’d missed having just the one home, how important that is to his mental health. He’s not unhappy to be driving back into the city after the longest road trip he’s ever been on, bringing home the reason they’d gone.

“Have you got any plans, Bucky?” he asks casually as he can as they roll on through to home. He catches Bucky’s eyes in the wing-mirror and so he sees when he shrugs. He sees the way Steve suddenly tenses, too, like he thinks Bucky’s just gonna announce his intention to walk right on out of his life again. Clearly Steve has not been present for the last five days, or else he needs his eyes checked.

“Stick around, maybe?” Bucky says, twisting his mouth into a tight, wry smile. “I’ve missed a lot of things New York has got to offer.”

Sam doesn’t imagine the way Bucky’s eyes slide to Steve, but since he’s not a dick he pretends not to have noticed. Instead he says, “Yeah, I’ve been feeling that way too. What about you, Rogers? Fancy settling in New York for a while?”

Steve matching Bucky’s wry smile is unexpected, since he’s been fluctuating between giddy and overwhelmed since the quinjet touched down five days ago, and that hasn’t left much room for sarcasm. “I don’t know,” he tells them. “I’m still kind of holding out for Australia.”

Bucky tells Steve he’s a moron at the same time Sam tells him he’s full of shit, so he thinks they’ve agreed to stay. Sam holds off telling Steve he’d better take Tony up on the apartment for a time when Steve doesn’t look this settled in his own skin; Sam will do real damage to the first thing to fracture how that looks on Steve right now.

Natasha meets them in Tony’s garage underneath the Tower, — Steve says something about how she always knows before he even does when he’s coming home to stay — and gives Sam and Steve each a kiss on the cheek and Bucky a carefully blank-faced nod. Steve and Bucky she herds towards the elevator just by telling Steve that Maria wants to see them as soon as they come back, or she’s sending the Hulk to get them, but Sam’s too happy to see her to follow just yet, shouting after them to not worry their pretty little super-soldier heads over their bags — bags that’re full of Pierce-related information and paperwork brought back as a sample for Maria and to be combed through for connections to Hydra — and that he’ll follow them up.

Instead of unloading the car, though, Sam finds he can’t quite look away from Nat just yet. Not straight away. If he counts up the individual days he’s known her, everything about the way he feels on seeing her feels indescribably dumb. He resolves not to do that again.

“So I think we’ll be sticking around New York for a little while,” he tells her.

Her eyes crinkle as she smiles, everything about her relaxing from official messenger to friend between one breath in and one breath out. She says, “good.” Says it like she means it. Says it with no hesitation, as though the truth has been dredged up out of her.

Sam says, “I missed you,” and he could have sworn it was supposed to be a joke a second before he said it. It was supposed to be a joke because they’ve been apart for less than a week and because they’re friends — good friends, friends who mean a lot to each other — but nothing more complicated than what friends can be already.

Natasha eyes him up and down, watches him try not to fidget under her gaze, smiles, and touches the back of his hand with her fingertips, stepping in closer than he’s ready for. She tells him, “It’s weird, but I hoped you would.”

She feathers a finger across his knuckles and tells him, “I think you’re pretty great, Sam Wilson.” She smiles. “Steve does seem to have good taste in people.” Sam opens his mouth to agree, to say, “yeah, he really does,” but she cuts across him. Says, “Maybe he knows more than either of us. Maybe he’s right, and together we would be a good thing.” 

Sam knows he looks like some kind of idiot but he really can’t feel his face right now; too much blood has rushed to it and he has no idea what to do. He could swear he used to be less like Steve. What happened? Natasha, either his savior or a bringer of doom, puts a hand over Sam’s cheek where she’d kissed it and looks him in the eye as she tells him, “We will go on as many dates as I decide before I sleep with you, and I’m telling you now I still think I like sex with women better.” Only, because all this time with irrational people has turned him all kinds of irrational, too, he hears all that and still thinks this is the best ending to this day he could have asked for.

So he says: “Fuck,” and, “Okay, yes. Yeah. Okay,” and deserves it when she smacks him over the head, deserves it more when she kisses his cheek, and manages to pull it together enough to at least say, “hey, ow, uncalled for, Romanov. You’re the worst,” when what he means is “you’re kind of the best and I might want to spend all of my time making sure that you know it.”

“Also, for our first date we are going ice skating,” Nat tells him, linking arms with him as she pulls him with her to the elevator. “And instead of bringing me flowers you are going to bring Steve, because if there’s a chance he’s ungraceful at something I have to see it in this lifetime.”

“Why did Steve think me and you together was going to be a good thing?” Sam wonders, as they step into the elevator. Nat drops his arm only to take his hand instead, lacing their fingers together, pressing her palm against his. “Clearly together we are going to ruin his life.”

Nat’s grin is wicked. “Serves him right,” she says, but a second later lets her smile falls and her expression turns serious. Sam might even say earnest. “But we need to look after him.” She looks down at their joined hands, frowning. Says, “He’s…”

“An idiot?”

Nat smiles wryly. “Obviously. But I was going to say vulnerable. And I think we’re the only ones in a position to see it.”

Sam does something really stupid, then, something he’s never even thought about doing in real life, and as he hits the emergency stop button on the elevator he hopes to god it doesn’t turn out that Natasha’s got a secret deadly fear of small spaces, though it might explain the hand-holding.

It’s just he’s feeling a lot at Natasha right then, and he suddenly needs to dramatically stop the elevator they’re in because, otherwise, this moment will be over too quick, and he suddenly has something very important to tell her.

She turns to him, raising an eyebrow as if to say, _what the hell is that about?_

Sam takes her other hand.

“Nat.” Sam looks her right in the eye even though it’s hard; has to, because it’s hard. “I don’t believe in good people.” Something in her eyes flickers, but it’s gone in another blink. He’s getting good at seeing her when she’s shocked, though. “I don’t think goodness is a thing some people are and some aren’t. It’s just things you do; you do a good thing or you don’t. You choose.” He swallows, feels like the whole elevator resounds with the sound. Stress is the worst, the things it makes you imagine are so ridiculous. He tells her: “A person isn’t good, I don’t think, goodness is just a trend in your life that you try to keep following.”

“You had to stop the elevator to tell me this?” Nat asks, but Sam sees her, sees the way her head is tilted just slightly like she was taking it all in to think about later, sees how she bites the inside of her cheek for just a second as if she needs to focus herself.

“Yes,” Sam says, then, “No. Not that.” He drops one of her hands and brings his to her cheek, touches her slowly to give her plenty of time to see and pull away. She watches him curiously and doesn’t. “Nat,” he says. “You are a good friend. You are a really good friend.”

It’s only when they both breathe out together that Sam realizes she’d been holding hers.

“You stopped the elevator to tell me that.” This time it’s not a question, and it almost sounds wet, like she’s teary, or like the words got caught in her mouth on their way to being said. She keeps hold of his hand as she pulls his shades — for driving in the winter sun — from his jacket pocket, pushing them up the bridge of her own nose as she turns away from him and says, “JARVIS, let’s move again, please,” and the elevator jumps back to life.

Sam keeps sneaking glances at her until she says, “I need you to not look at me. Okay?” and she’s definitely got a tear or two in her voice. This is not what Sam had intended. This is the opposite of what he intended. He’s scum of this earth.

The elevator stops, the doors open, and Nat squeezes Sam’s hand in what for a second he assumes is a goodbye.

Then she kisses him, and he figures maybe not.

“You’re not in charge of emotional moments any more, okay?” Nat tells him, glaring at him through darkened glass. “You’re irresponsible with them.”

“Okay,” Sam agrees, reaching up to take his shades back. He’s half surprised when she lets him. He gives her a hopeful smile, one he knows is weak — he just made a woman made of steel and fire almost cry, okay, he’s a little off his smile game.

She pecks him on the lips again. Murmurs “thank you” against them. When she pulls away, she glares at him as if to say, _mention this again and I know where you sleep_.

“JARVIS?”

“It never happened, Agent Romanov.”

Sam’s in way over his head, so far way, way over his head. But Nat’s still holding his hand, and he’s pretty sure — he’s certain, he’s one hundred percent certain — that he wouldn’t have it any other way.

He wouldn’t change a thing.

**Author's Note:**

> warnings:
> 
> \- there's a pretty lengthy discussion in this one between nat and sam about what went down between steve and nat in the last fic, and there are certain consent issues discussed. short hand version: discussion of sex where the character had prepared themselves to go through with it but did not expect to enjoy it only to find that they did, causing that character to question their identity -- including but not limited to their sexuality.
> 
> \- natasha's really problematic past is discussed a bit in-fic, and bucky's past also makes appearances. a lot of it is taken from comic canon and beaten into a shape that just about fits the mcu, but a lot of it's ambiguous.
> 
> \- once again, this fic hasn't been american-picked or beta'd.
> 
> thanks so much for all your comments on the last fic, guys. if you've any questions, or if you just want to say hey, look me up on [twitter](https://twitter.com/misprinting) or [tumblr](http://misprinting.tumblr.com/). :)


End file.
